The correct response to the Trump spectacle is to retire in disgust, but there’s something about Melania. Everything she does is laced with this mesmerising ambiguity: does she just loathe her husband? Or does she despise everything about the entire business?

However idiosyncratic a first lady, Melania can never escape her context. Both Eleanor Roosevelt and Lou Henry Hoover had fine proto-feminist credentials (although Hoover felt bound to drop them all) in feminism’s nascent phase; it was when the women’s movement was established, paradoxically, that first ladies had to start acting like Stepford wives. Hillary Clinton, having begun her pitch as her husband’s intellectual equal, found herself in a cookie-baking competition with Barbara Bush, which was like watching the boxer Nicola Adams having to drop her final bout for some fine embroidery in order to win her Olympic gold. It’s not really a paradox, though, is it? That was the 90s all over; prove your strong views, then demonstrate how easily you can think the opposite, in case anyone doesn’t like your strong views.

Michelle Obama drew that into a more comfortable, 00s shape with her apparently boundless enthusiasm for all causes, from freeing kidnapped Nigerian girls to the benefits of exercise. Melania may not be reluctant, so much as theatrically embodying a 21st-century cultural endpoint, a wry, impeccably groomed nihilism, ascending each podium like a woman who, sentenced to the guillotine, doesn’t care.